Obsessed With Taking the Plunge

It can get pretty lonely being the kind of person who goes over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Anna Edson Taylor (1838-1921) made her name more than a century ago by doing just that, and received oceans of publicity. Yet during the many years of her life portrayed in “Queen of the Mist,” Michael John LaChiusa’s obsessive musical portrait of an obsessive woman, she encounters only one true kindred spirit. And he’s not exactly someone whose name you’d want linked to yours for eternity.

In a telling scene in this production from the Transport Group, which opened on Sunday night at the Gym at Judson, Anna (Mary Testa) offers some advice to an agitated stranger with a foreign accent (Tally Sessions), a fellow who seems to share her fanatical spirit but just can’t commit to his (unnamed) cause. “We can and we must act on our impulses, our dreams!” Anna tells him. So this hapless little man, who turns out to be Leon Czolgosz, goes off and assassinates President William McKinley.

Mr. LaChiusa, the high-reaching creator of “Hello Again” and “Marie Christine,” may be tipping his hat here to his fellow composer and spiritual antecedent Stephen Sondheim, whose “Assassins” (1990) set Czolgosz’s ambition to wry and haunting melody. But there’s more than whimsical homage afoot in this perversely witty encounter between Anna Edson Taylor and Leon Czolgosz. Mr. LaChiusa draws an implicit comparison to show just how irrationally driven his heroine is, to take the measure of what she calls “the desire within that burns you to cinder ash.”

It’s safe to assume that Mr. LaChiusa shares some of that desire. As deeds of daring go, writing eccentric, highbrow historical musicals in a business that rewards hummable tunes and straightforward story lines may not rank with shooting a president or shooting the falls. But it probably requires a similar degree of true, mad, deep dedication.

It would be a pleasure to report that “Queen of the Mist” seems poised to become the popular hit that has so far eluded Mr. LaChiusa. But while it features some beautiful (and, yes, even hummable) music, the show suffers from the monotony that tends to accompany monomania. Like Anna, who was 63 when she stepped into her custom-made barrel and the record books in 1901, “Queen” moves forward with a steady, fixed intensity that makes it feel as if it never moves forward at all.

Single-minded bulldozer women have provided compelling centers for musicals past. Think of Momma Rose in “Gypsy” or even the title character of “Hello, Dolly!” And Ms. Testa, a performer of radioactive presence and lungs of steel who appeared on Broadway in “On the Town” and “Xanadu,” has the stuff of which musical bulldozers are made.

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Mary Testa as Anna Edson Taylor, who felt driven to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, in "Queen of the Mist."Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

She has no problem holding center stage in “Queen,” which has been directed with lyricism and lucidity by Jack Cummings III. She’s as emphatically, formidably there as one of the heads carved out of Mount Rushmore — and about as unvarying. With her hair piled atop her head into a briochelike helmet and her eyes full of brimstone, she resembles a cross between those madcap actresses Elsa Lanchester and Beatrice Lillie, and you keep waiting for the antic side of her to break out.

Instead, her performance is as tightly corseted as her funereal black costumes (by Kathryn Rohe). This is probably the only interpretation that Anna, as written, allows. Whether she’s on the way up (in the first act, which ends with the big plunge at Niagara) or down (in the second, which charts the succeeding years of anticlimax), her persona and posture remain fiery but frozen.

The serviceable supporting cast includes Andrew Samonsky as Frank Russell, Anna’s lowlife manager, and Julia Murney, who as the suffragist Carrie Nation leads the production’s liveliest number. Mr. Cummings and the designers Sandra Goldmark (sets) and R. Lee Kennedy (lighting) make efficient and sometimes poetic use of limited space to evoke the people and places of Anna’s voyage through the early 20th century in a country that even then ate its celebrities for breakfast. (As a panoramic social portrait of an American yesteryear “Queen” often brings to mind John Doyle’s productions of Mr. Sondheim’s “Road Show.”)

The swirling score is caressingly played by a six-member orchestra. (Chris Fenwick is the musical director, and Michael Starobin did the orchestrations.) Mr. LaChiusa is an old hand at finding prickly neurotic dissonance within pretty, old-fashioned melodiousness. He does so to sometimes ravishing effect here, particularly in the Act II finale, “The Fall,” which recapitulates the one defining event of Anna’s life.

It’s a bravura piece of music, done full justice by Ms. Testa’s magnetically focused interpretation. Yet “The Fall” is also only an intensified version of everything that has been said implicitly before. Even riding the rapids this “Queen” gives the impression that it’s mostly just treading water.